CedarRise
Cedar Cloud Rise is a solo consultancy based in Boston. Charlotte Thwaite works with founders and leadership…
About Cedar Cloud Rise
Cedar Cloud Rise started in the autumn of 2015, out of a specific frustration. Charlotte…
The name of the practice matters a little. Cedar is a tree that takes a long time to grow and is difficult to cut down once it is…
Charlotte handles every engagement directly. No junior staff, no handoffs partway through.
The first few conversations are about understanding the real problem, not pitching a solution.
Most of the work produces a document: a memo, a decision framework, a structured plan. Something you can return to.
The most common mistake in consulting work is moving to recommendations before the diagnosis is complete. It is an understandable mistake. Clients want answers. Consultants want to be useful. But a recommendation made before the situation is understood is just a guess dressed up as advice.
Read more →Most organizations that hire a strategy consultant do not get much from it. That is a blunt thing to say, but it is true often enough to be worth saying. The question is not whether strategy work is valuable in principle. It is whether the conditions are right for it to be valuable in your situation.
Read more →Most high-stakes decisions go wrong not because the decision-maker lacked information, but because they did not examine the assumptions underneath their preferred option. The information was there. The assumptions were invisible.
Read more →
Charlotte Thwaite founded Cedar Cloud Rise in 2015 after spending several years inside organizations that moved fast and planned poorly. She works directly with founders, department heads, and small leadership teams on strategy, decision-making, and organizational structure. Her approach is unhurried and methodical: she reads the situation before she says anything, and she does not hand over a slide deck and disappear. Charlotte runs the practice as a solo consultancy out of Boston, taking on a small number of engagements at a time so the work stays close.